UPDATE: 1.6.4 is out, which fixes some issues with 1.6.3:- Fixed a bug that caused allies’ damage to increase dramatically over time.- Fixed a bug that disabled the warning dialog box when you tried to walk into flame while levitating.- Fixed a bug with playback controls when watching a recording.- Fixed a broken message when an ally absorbs centipedes’ weakness ability.- Magical glyphs connected to guardians will not appear in hallways.

It is my pleasure to announce the release of Brogue v1.6.3 for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. Downloads, screenshots, a forum and a wiki can be found here:

New with 1.6.3:- When examining items, unequipped weapons will tell you the percent by which equipping the weapon would affect your accuracy and damage, given what you know about the item. Similarly, examining unequipped armor will tell you what your expected armor value would be if you equipped it.- You get a free search every turn, as though you are always wearing a +1.5 ring of searching. In addition, secrets embedded in walls (secret doors, hidden levers) are 33% harder to detect.- Paralysis trap pressure plates are now physically separate from the locations that emit the paralytic gas, which means there are more hidden tiles that can be discovered to reveal the existence of a paralysis trap, and paralysis gas will generally take a turn or two to reach the player after stepping on the plate.- Several new quest rooms and improvements to existing quest rooms.- Stairs are generated in torchlit nooks in the walls of the dungeon.- Out of depth monsters generated in shallower depths are drawn from a narrower band of depths, making depths 2-5 easier, and some monster hordes (bog monsters and groups of vampire bats) are specifically prevented from spawning out of depth.- Portcullises that block poison gas trap rooms cannot be obstructed with items or creatures. Instead, a hidden lever will be generated inside of the room when the trap is activated that will lift the portcullis.- Fixed a bug that constrained possible quest room generation to certain depths.- Quietus and paralysis runics trigger slightly less often, and slowness runics trigger slightly more often. Slowness also lasts longer.- Hidden dungeon features (secret doors, traps, etc.) are revealed in omniscience mode during recording playback.- New cursed runic: armor of immolation.- New monster: dart turret.- Invisibility granted by a wand is now timed. The player can become invisible with a reflected bolt from a wand of invisibility, which is treated as being extremely stealthy.- Allies will now announce when they are ready to absorb a new ability.- Allies will more reliably resume being friendly after being affected by magical fear.- Allies can now absorb centipedes’ ability to cause weakness.- Creatures that can cast or breathe fire are now more careful with flammable terrain.- Pathfinding over harmful terrain while under the effect of a temporary status that provides immunity to that terrain -- for example, pathfinding over lava while temporarily immune to fire -- is handled much more intelligently.- Tweaked the rate at which allies’ combat abilities improve over time.- Dar blademasters have less defense; eels have more.- Transference benefits allies less.- Weakness lasts 50% longer.- Explosion tiles will disappear instead of promoting into gas fire.- Fixed a bug that could occasionally cause allies to attack you while they were attempting to escape from harmful terrain such as poisonous gas.- Fixed a bug that sometimes caused fleeing monkeys to leap into lava if the player was fire-immune, or into chasms if the player was levitating.- Fixed a bug that sometimes caused nausea to cause recordings to go out of sync.- Fixed a bug that occasionally generated bridges that lead into deep water.- Fixed a bug that could render gold invisible and unobtainable, though it would still appear on the sidebar.- Fixed an exploit that could allow summoner allies to summon an unlimited number of minions.- Axes and spears will no longer hit creatures embedded in obstruction crystals.- Monster cages will obstruct gas, so caged monsters won’t get steamed to death before you reach them.- Killing a shielded monster with a weapon of quietus generates the correct amount of blood.- Items will no longer float away from you if you are entangled in a spiderweb over deep water.- Messages that refer to monsters that cannot be seen (referred to as “something”) will be appropriately gender-neutral.- Unicorns have a more apt appearance.- Phylacteries will be destroyed by negation magic.- The help screen is more streamlined.- The version number is displayed on the title screen.

Finished my first game. Many vaults, many powerful items, many ogre allies... Stupid death forgetting I was low health when jumping into a collapsible floor trap! Almost got killed by a Winged guardian before I understood the trick, and an Underworm trap also proved to be a great challenge.

Are we specifically talking about the centipedes? I was feeling that they were a bit overpowered in 1.6.2, apparently you increased their power significantly?

There are a lot of angles to attack this from. The first is the escape invariant, the fundamental theorem of Brogue monsters if you will: Any single-speed melee monster is bounded by the situational difficulty of leading it across blocking terrain. If you meet a centipede and can't handle it, you can jump in a chasm, swim across a lake, trigger confusion near magma, or do anything else that you can do to similar monsters.

The second is the instakill invariant, where no matter what a monster does, it's not as bad as killing you in one blow (unless it encourages unfun behavior). If a centipede weakens you, well, it didn't kill you. A potion of healing or a potion of strength will make the effect go away immediately. Centipede weakness now lasts 300 turns -- that's the same number it takes you to regenerate from zilch, without a ring of regen; it's still only one sixth of a ration of food! That means that unless another centipede comes along that you also can't escape, or a dart turret, you can pretty much always just sleep it off. And before the 50% increase, that latter situation obtained far too rarely.

Pender wrote:- Paralysis trap pressure plates are now physically separate from the locations that emit the paralytic gas, which means there are more hidden tiles that can be discovered to reveal the existence of a paralysis trap, and paralysis gas will generally take a turn or two to reach the player after stepping on the plate.- Out of depth monsters generated in shallower depths are drawn from a narrower band of depths, making depths 2-5 easier, and some monster hordes (bog monsters and groups of vampire bats) are specifically prevented from spawning out of depth.- Portcullises that block poison gas trap rooms cannot be obstructed with items or creatures. Instead, a hidden lever will be generated inside of the room when the trap is activated that will lift the portcullis.

Excellent! These could all create inescapable insta-death situations, so I'm very happy to see them go.

Pender wrote:- New cursed runic: armor of immolation.

I'll be interested to see this one in action. This might make me re-think my strategy of putting on the best looking armor in my inventory right before I'm going to read a pile of scrolls.

Pender wrote:- Dar blademasters have less defense; eels have more.

Thank goodness, blademasters were such a pain because they were so hard to hit. I'd seen long stretches of RNG cruelness result in my death because the threshold to hit those guys was so high. (You miss, you miss, you miss x5...you die) As for eels, I generally run from them anyway, so that won't change anything.

Pender wrote:- Creatures that can cast or breathe fire are now more careful with flammable terrain.- Explosion tiles will disappear instead of promoting into gas fire.

The merciful end of explosion cycles, and allies not setting (as many) of them off removes yet more unavoidable insta-kill situations.

This version is great! Now that awareness is not almost mandatory, I find myself using a lot of different ring combinations. After many tries, I managed a v.1.6.4 ascension using a +12 staff of lightning, many staves of firebolt and blinking, a +0 war axe with +0 plate mail, a +3 ring of transference, and cloning a unicorn with a wand of plenty (they still died by the end to dar teams). Other highlights included an underworm tunnel at depth 8 (really atmospheric, and an interesting challenge that early), and no runics (I checked everything except some items locked in quest rooms I picked a staff from). I didn't dare to fight dragons, so I just started diving at depth 23, magic mapped the last few levels and sneaked past anything dangerous with telepathy.

Is this a non-Universal binary? I recall that 1.6.2 had been working okay under 10.4 apart from the load game/recording, and I'd like to see how well 1.6.3/4 work in spite of that "10.5+". I can't do that if it's an Intel-only binary.

scratskinner wrote:Is this a non-Universal binary? I recall that 1.6.2 had been working okay under 10.4 apart from the load game/recording, and I'd like to see how well 1.6.3/4 work in spite of that "10.5+". I can't do that if it's an Intel-only binary.

If all else fails, you can compile it for your machine (Just follow the instructions that come with the source code)

scratskinner wrote:Is this a non-Universal binary? I recall that 1.6.2 had been working okay under 10.4 apart from the load game/recording, and I'd like to see how well 1.6.3/4 work in spite of that "10.5+". I can't do that if it's an Intel-only binary.

Yes, I had to upgrade to Xcode 4.1 (from 3.2.6), and unfortunately it does not support compiling universal binaries. Apple tries to make it progressively more difficult to support legacy systems over time, and I generally try to jump through their hoops to do so anyway, but it doesn't look like there's any way around this one. Sorry. If you download Xcode 3 yourself, you could compile it.

If it was the intention to never feel safe again, you succeeded in that. I just burned to death after getting a doorkey on D1. Don't know if the game is actually harder now but the time of just cruising through the first few depths is definitely over.

coolsnake wrote:If it was the intention to never feel safe again, you succeeded in that. I just burned to death after getting a doorkey on D1. Don't know if the game is actually harder now but the time of just cruising through the first few depths is definitely over.

I've noticed this too. This version is much more variable, in a very good way. Death comes more often, and in more unexpected ways. Well done Pender!

Swamped in work for just a few weeks and I miss a Brogue release, what a mess. Many thanks for keeping it up! We appreciate it. I have a half-finished Brogue review on my harddisk -- hopefully I don't have to change very much. Guess I'll drop it here first before showing it to the Crawlers.

dpeg wrote:Swamped in work for just a few weeks and I miss a Brogue release, what a mess. Many thanks for keeping it up! We appreciate it. I have a half-finished Brogue review on my harddisk -- hopefully I don't have to change very much. Guess I'll drop it here first before showing it to the Crawlers.

Now that I've played Brogue 1.6.4 some more, and actually ascended for the first time,I think Brogue has become quite easier with the increase of vaults. It is much easier to identify items, there is more chance to create a favorite or simply good combinations of items, there are more "library" vaults full of scrolls and potions to regularly refill one's stock, etc. It is also interesting to note that several participants in the past two contests have said how much better they did in those runs than in those from Brogue 1.6.2.

The increased frequency of vaults and puzzles has also lead to a slight cheapening of the game content, since a player can now be exposed to everything the game has to offer in only a few games.

So, I wouldn't mind if the next version of Brogue went back to a machine factor of 1.00 instead of 1.40 (or maybe 1.05).

Also, independently of that issue, I think there's a bit too much nested vaults. It's interesting to have a dilemma, much less so to have two or three in a row. Currently it seems there is a fixed chance that a key for a vault will be in the form of a "new vault containing a key in addition to other items". Maybe this chance should decrease strongly as more and more vaults are chained.

thedrin wrote:I'm seeing lots of keys in the first 10 levels and very few in the next 10.

This is the problem. The machine frequency is fine, but the game content does become "cheapened" if the player gets an overload of gear from early depth vaults. Nested vaults contribute to this problem - I feel spoiled for choice when just a single key lets me trawl through five vaults in a row until I finally pick something I like. With fewer early and nested vaults, Brogue would have more of a "Shut up and eat it" quality. You take what you're given and you make the best of it.

In my recent games, I've often settled on my "final" gear early in the game (find a good staff, an uncursed plate armor, an enchanted strong weapon, maybe a runic, and dump enchants on them) and then mostly skip similar items in the lower vaults, only getting secondary gear there (utility staves, rings, etc.).

I completely agree with the comments above on vault frequency and nestedness. I feel like the game now is far too resource rich, too consistently, whereas some of my favorite runs have been extremely resource poor, where I've been forced to make builds I could never have imagined viable. Finding an early firebolt or lightning staff used to be a nice bonus that ensured that particular game might make it to the midgame if one played carefully, whereas now you find those items (or comparable) in every single game. I liked the feeling of danger that came out of having to make do with leather armor and dagger until you found that critical item you might center your game around.

As another general comment, I feel like extremely out of depth allies shouldn't be generated. It might just be because the last two weeks' contests had naga allies generate on level 5, but nothing makes the game a snoozefest like an ally that trivializes every threat until the endgame. Early trolls are a big culprit, and while rare, I've had early horrors carry me through the late-midgame and many lumenstones, all without explicitly investing into any ally centric items. I feel like ally builds could remain as powerful as they are now, but should be more dependent on using the ally centric items. It's worth noting that ally builds have gotten significantly more powerful with auto-search and easier to find traps.

Only just played several games of v1.6.4 (hadn't played since my last ascension v1.5.2, yeay updates =).Couple thoughts:1) So far I agree with most above posters on vault frequency.It's not just too much riches (though I think so) it's also a bit of an atmosphere breaker. Having multiple important treasure rooms on one floor feels a bit odd, but the chained treasure rooms just feel a little silly. (I totally see the gambling for better loot idea, which is cool, but it's an exception to the simple elegance that typifies the rest of brogue I think.)

2) I LOVE the auto search and the addition of gas vents for paralytic traps (though it was the confusion traps that gave me headaches b/c of allies - headaches I cherish though, don't change that please ). Before I felt like you HAD to have an awareness ring to progress - or *lots* of patience.

3) Have you considered depth limiting particular items? In particular the staff of lightening feels OP'd to me (it was integral to all of my deep runs). Almost no one is immune, hits groups, and you can dump endless enchantments into it and keep getting benefit. It might be more exciting if only less combat oriented staffs (at least not lightening) generated on the first, say, 8ish, levels. Creates tension about use of enchant scrolls and increase the instances of creative running using blink, obstruction, discord, entrancement(name?), from enemies you can't combat etc. It doesn't feel right that I'm least excited to get the staff I most want... [Alternatively you could decrease xp for staff kills, but I think that just makes the game more opaque.]

4) Increasing the % of enchanted weapons in vaults (while decreasing vault #) might also be nice. But perhaps I'm just biased toward a mage build because of the simplicity of powering up a staff of lightening. I did feel like melee builds were more viable due to the extra loot and preserving that a bit would be cool. Alternatively: make detect magic potions or uncurse scrolls more common for easier IDing...

5) Personally not in love with the intro screen. Again, it lacks the elegance that typifies the rest of brogue. Not big deal of course.

All said, Brogue remains a piece of art. And while I could do without the button displays adding them makes the game 10x more accessible, so great move.

esk wrote:It doesn't feel right that I'm least excited to get the staff I most want...

You hit the nail on the head.

esk wrote:4) Increasing the % of enchanted weapons in vaults (while decreasing vault #) might also be nice. But perhaps I'm just biased toward a mage build because of the simplicity of powering up a staff of lightening. I did feel like melee builds were more viable due to the extra loot and preserving that a bit would be cool. Alternatively: make detect magic potions or uncurse scrolls more common for easier IDing...

I agree with making vaults rarer again and making the melee gear in vaults more enticing. Instead of increasing the rate of runics in vaults I think the right move would be to make it so weapons and armour in vaults are never cursed. The problem is that there's only one item in the game - potions of detect magic - that can make an entire vault's weapons and armours safe to test. This forces people into optimal-but-boring techniques like shuttling all items down to the first level with a vault before potion testing. The weapon and armour ID game works reasonably well in general because a single scroll of remove curse can make an entire inventory safe for testing, but there's no item that can uncurse more than one vault item at one time. Negative enchantment could be decoupled from curses, so that weapons and armour in vaults might still suck, but at least you could work on identifying them without potentially needing to waste another scroll of remove curse / protect x / enchantment on every single item. At the very least, scrolls of remove curse could have a negation-like effect where all gear in your LOS becomes uncursed.

This is veering off-topic, but it's become obvious from the weekly contests that nobody cares about any armour besides plate mail. The interesting, whimsical armour runics simply aren't powerful or practical enough to be worth playing the ID game for. There's nothing close to an armour of quietus or paralysis; even everyone's favourite armour runics, mutuality and reflection, are only useful in extremely limited circumstances. Some ideas:- Absorption should have an exponential increase instead of linear.- Spectral clones created by multiplicity should exist permanently until destroyed, like spectral blades. They should have ally AI and follow you down stairs.- Reprisal armour should have a second percentage: the damage that enemies suffer when they miss.- Consider introducing more powerful runics, possibly as counterparts to weapon runics, such as armour of escaping: the player has a percentage chance of being hasted on damage.

No hard feelings, Pender. The more I like a game the more critical I get.

I personally find reflection really valuable because it opens up the possibility of a very high lumenstone run, which I don't often get the chance to do. I've enchanted up armors with as low as 5 or 6 armor (including enchantment) for reflection. For mutuality, I probably won't go below about 9 armor unless I have something ridiculous like a war axe and ring of transferrence. I haven't used absorption much, but I once had a really powerful one starting with either a +1 or +2 banded mail of absorption, so I'll put my threshold there at 8-9 as well. I think it would benefit from super-linear growth (or at least higher than 1 to 1 growth like conjuration).

Unfortunately, I think reprisal is near useless because it hinges on you getting hit and does relatively little damage. If you get hit by a tentacle horror or dragon, it's usually too late. The same can be said for multiplicity.

In contrast, a +0 plate mail is good enough to be an end game armor. There's usually a lot of question with where to put enchant scrolls, especially when inventory starts filling up, but dumping them into a plate mail is almost always a safe bet. A disadvantage of plate mail might be its high strength requirement, but enchants and strength potions can make it wearable for decent defense by around D:7, if you've found one.

I've been using the 'c'all function to label items I get from vaults with the other items I could swap them for. I'd appreciate it if these labels persisted even after the item is fully-identified, and if I could label fully-identified items instead of being told "You already know what that is." Thanks dude.

Creaphis wrote:I've been using the 'c'all function to label items I get from vaults with the other items I could swap them for. I'd appreciate it if these labels persisted even after the item is fully-identified, and if I could label fully-identified items instead of being told "You already know what that is." Thanks dude.

Indeed. Or perhaps the pre-existing code for labeling keys could be an additional tag?

Turn 22320 in this recording: I shoot a bolt of lightning that reflects off a golem, back at me, and hits every single one of my allies as they're lined up behind me in a hallway. They all switch to "hunting" status. Intended behaviour?

Creaphis wrote:Turn 22320 in this recording: I shoot a bolt of lightning that reflects off a golem, back at me, and hits every single one of my allies as they're lined up behind me in a hallway. They all switch to "hunting" status. Intended behaviour?

True, and I suppose we could consider this behaviour to be lightning's weakness. Still, my allies constantly bombard themselves with bolts reflected off of golems and I've never seen them turn on each other because of it.

Creaphis wrote:True, and I suppose we could consider this behaviour to be lightning's weakness. Still, my allies constantly bombard themselves with bolts reflected off of golems and I've never seen them turn on each other because of it.

Now this qualifies for a behavior change, I'd say!

I think "ANGRY" would be a nice status effect to see, and while they're angry they basically act like they're in a targeted state of discord -- and it's only in the ANGRY state that you can lose an ally permanently. No immediate jumps to hunting. The other advantage is that the game could jump to ANGRY with less provocation; right now you can light a fire in fungus and use that to light an ally on fire and they won't mind. If anger is the only thing at stake, the game could make deductions that don't have to remotely perfect.

I think "ANGRY" would be a nice status effect to see, and while they're angry they basically act like they're in a targeted state of discord -- and it's only in the ANGRY state that you can lose an ally permanently. No immediate jumps to hunting. The other advantage is that the game could jump to ANGRY with less provocation; right now you can light a fire in fungus and use that to light an ally on fire and they won't mind. If anger is the only thing at stake, the game could make deductions that don't have to remotely perfect.

Well I think such behavior could end up being hardly predictable. Also it does not seem clear how much that would add to the game.

Once I had to finish my dar battlemage allies by sealing doors with obstruction, throwing caustic gas potion and standing on the remaining doorway so they would die off. It was clearly intended to kill them, but for a game it would most likely be very hard to determine. And one most likely can come up with many such ideas. Which ones will the game be able to recognize? Is there guaranties the there wont be false positives? I'd say its better to simplify things, that only direct attack causes hostility.

morphles wrote:Which ones will the game be able to recognize? Is there guaranties the there wont be false positives?

Good point. Even scrolls of cause fear still leave my allies wandering or hunting about 50% of the time - there's obviously some very finicky calculations involved in determining monster status and adding another status wouldn't help that.

morphles wrote:Which ones will the game be able to recognize? Is there guaranties the there wont be false positives? I'd say its better to simplify things, that only direct attack causes hostility.

This status would be temporary and timed, so false positives would matter much less. Temporary ally loss is interesting and can make a bad situation worse; permanent ally loss, and total ally infighting, can make a good run useless. So the idea is only useful if it's calibrated around generating a great many false positives.

That means that the behavior of an ally while ANGRY cannot be the same as while DISCORDANT or HUNTING. I would presume, for instance, that an ANGRY monster would cease to be angry after landing a single blow against you. It would also go right on prioritizing enemies.

The consequences of this are these: A changed flavor to ally builds; better integration with any future faction system; the complete removal of instantaneous alliance-breaking.

Creaphis wrote:Even scrolls of cause fear still leave my allies wandering or hunting about 50% of the time - there's obviously some very finicky calculations involved in determining monster status and adding another status wouldn't help that.

Just bugs. The leadership code just needs to be cleaned up to make it more maintainable.

I have a suggestion - it would be nice if there were separate bitmaps for the text messages and the 'graphics'. My son and I had a bit of fun putting ears, arms etc on the "O" and tails on the "j". Oh how we laughed when the new doctored letters also appeared in the text messages.

Can enemy-induced discord last for fewer turns? Most monster spellcasting abilities seem equivalent to a level 3 staff or so while monster discord seems more like level 4 or 5 (though I haven't counted the exact number of turns it lasts). The problem is that right now obstruction is pretty much the only effect that lasts long enough to keep your allies from tearing each other apart. It's admittedly possible to counter discord with confusion, paralysis and descent but these are extremely risky tactics compared to the straight-forward, guaranteed success of obstruction. Temporary invisibility could help keep your infighting allies from finding each other but might actually last too long for this purpose, since your allies could end up killing each other with offensive spells afterward. If discord had a shorter duration then there would be a few more "elegant" solutions for the player to choose from. You could distract the discordant ally with conjured blades without a high risk of killing him completely. You could freeze your allies with entrancement. You could heal and protect them from the damage they do to each other before running out of charges. You could teleport or beckon your allies apart from each other without them being able to reach each other again in time. You could buy enough time by slowing them. You know, emergent stuff.

I'm thinking that paralysis traps are actually too easy to avoid, now, since they're always surrounded on all sides by detectable vents. At the same time, on the extremely rare occasions when the player steps on the plate without detecting a vent first, there isn't much the player can do to avoid the gas without the right staves, since they'll be hemmed in by gas on all sides. A much more interesting set up for all gas traps would be one vent, one plate. This way, if you spot a vent somewhere, you still don't know anything about what kind of trap it is, or where, and you have to investigate - and if the pressure plate is behind you, your allies might set it off while you're still poking around. If you stumble on the plate before spotting the vent, the gas vent might be in front of you allowing you to safely retreat - and it might be behind you, forcing you to either endure the gas or escape into unexplored, enemy territory. This would also give the player the chance to "defeat" more traps with escapes and fire sources, which always feels good. Paralysis clouds should be made bigger or longer-lasting if they'll only come out of a single vent.

Obstruction actually isn't a sure thing for protecting allies because everyone on the outside edge of the obstructed area is vulnerable to spell attacks, and can cast them. I lost an ifrit in the weekend contest this way.

I like the current random arrangement of vents and switches for traps. Sometimes it's deadly and sometimes it's an advantage the player can use to trap monsters. I haven't noticed "always surrounded on all sides by detectable vents" pattern, on the contrary sometimes the switch is located away from the vents altogether and can be used to remote activate a hazard area.

tinyrodent wrote:I like the current random arrangement of vents and switches for traps. Sometimes it's deadly and sometimes it's an advantage the player can use to trap monsters. I haven't noticed "always surrounded on all sides by detectable vents" pattern, on the contrary sometimes the switch is located away from the vents altogether and can be used to remote activate a hazard area.

It's not as random as you may think. My understanding is that the game tries to place four vents for every paralysis pressure plate, very roughly in the four cardinal directions, with certain minimum and maximum distances from the plate, but usually only three or fewer vents are generated because of rock tiles being in the way of the others. In general, though, if there's open space on the side of a paralysis trap that you're approaching from, there will be a vent there to warn you about it.

Note that what I'm proposing would effectively make all traps more random, which means they'll sometimes be deadly and sometimes advantageous, with more opportunities for remote activation. There could also be a random chance of extra vents being generated for any trap type.

I have to agree with Creaphis current paralysis just feels odd. I would totally support the idea of one pressure plate one went, and most importantly for all gas traps; or even for other traps, like fire some (small) displacement could be good, if it can be made sure that trigger square will be engulfed with flame. And as I said some time earlier when we have remote triggers, as with paralysis, more trap types become possible: <projectile> trap that shoots <projectile> from hidden hole in the wall in the plate direction, where <projectile> can be arrow, dart(str sapping), poison, fire lightning bolt, maybe even something more exotic - obstruction bolt, spider web, discord bolt?

Btw does discord do anything to the player? Seeing as effects of discord are two sided - discordant creature attack anything AND is attacked by everyone, I really see no reason why player can not be affected. is attacked by everyone seems very simple to do, allies just treat discordant player as any other discordant monster, also while player is discordant hunting/wandering/ally status could be hidden replaced with "unknown". Only possible problem here is that discord casting enemies could become way more dangerous and would most likely nerf ally build very considerably.

Joshua Day wrote:I think "ANGRY" would be a nice status effect to see, and while they're angry they basically act like they're in a targeted state of discord -- and it's only in the ANGRY state that you can lose an ally permanently.

It could be interesting in combination with a staff of entrancement, this would allow the player to make enemies angry at each other, with a few well chosen shots of entrancement.

I find that wands of slowness are good at making the usual late game threats (horrors, dragons) manageable for almost any build. In this sense, it's almost as good as polymorphism or negation, which also serve the purpose of eliminating single, strong targets. You'd be insane to fight a dragon toe to toe with a plain broadsword and platemail, but if you're getting 4 attacks to its every one, things become a bit more managable. It's still one of the weaker wands, but it's worth keeping around.

I actually dislike the slowness rune because like any rune, it requires a good number of enchants to become useful, and doesn't ever become quite powerful enough that you can melee the aforementioned horrors and dragons.

Cybermg wrote:I actually dislike the slowness rune because like any rune, it requires a good number of enchants to become useful, and doesn't ever become quite powerful enough that you can melee the aforementioned horrors and dragons.

I disagree completely. The slowness runic is great - you just have to pair it with another weapon. I just played a game where I found a +2 dagger of slowness. I spent a grand total of two enchantments on it. With my strength level it had an effective enchant of +7, an activation rate well over 50% and a duration around 25 turns. Give a dragon a quick stab and then swap to a warhammer. Good game.

Allies capable of casting negation will negate other allies who are "entranced." Considering that nobody can entrance entities except for the player, this is essentially mutiny, and completely unexpected/unintuitive.

Creaphis wrote:Allies capable of casting negation will negate other allies who are "entranced." Considering that nobody can entrance entities except for the player, this is essentially mutiny, and completely unexpected/unintuitive.

Intended solution: Add an enemy capable of casting entrancement

Ideas for its behaviour:If it knows of a trap, chasm or tile that is on fire/explosions and it could lure you onto it it will lure you onto it. (Lava would be great too - but instakilling the player, not so much. xD)Otherwise it'll lure you towards itself and bite you. (Trance spider?)It'd need a limitation on its ability to entrance, otherwise it could just retrance over and over again - 'can only trance at a range' is obviously broken with the aforementioned behaviour, 'can only trance in melee' is a bit boring, maybe it'd have to be something like 'can only trance once every N turns' or 'can only trance on a 1/N chance'

Hey, how about "can immobilize its prey" as a learnable ally ability? I think that would be interesting - you could use your ally to grab spellcasters and stop them from fleeing, and it would also have interesting interactions with invisibility, so that monsters would try to move to attack you (since they see nobody else) but they're held in place by your invisible ally.

Somehow that hasn't bothered me. Usually there seems to be a common sense difference between what's learnable and what isn't, and this is also the kind of thing that can be discovered through experience. Brogue is very up-front with all of the information that you need to be able to play it, but a text-box doesn't pop up on depth 1 saying "You're going to start running into dragons around floor 23, so try to enchant a staff of conjuration or dominate a tentacle horror by then." I'd argue that which abilities can be learned and which can't is that sort of information.

I do see your point though. Maybe abilities that can be learned should be highlighted in green in the trait list.

EDIT: Now that I'm thinking about it, I guess negation doesn't really follow common sense. Some plausibly-biological abilities (eg. vampire bats with flight, poisonous spiders and centipedes) can be negated, as can some "personality traits" (eg. "moves erratically"). Also, some magical traits survive negation, like flamedancers' flame generation.

A bit of a non-sequitur: imagine if everything was learnable. "Your troll moves erratically, keeps its distance, attacks slowly and does not regenerate."

So, I just posted in the contest #25 thread that a +3 war pike of paralysis is the absolute best weapon you can find in Brogue. I'm replaying the seed just for kicks, and I've already realized the error of my ways. Enchanted to +5, the runic still only has a 15% chance of activating, and another +1 would only bump it up to 18%. I thought that daggers normally had better runic activation rates than heavier weapons just because of the strength advantage, but it's obvious from these numbers that runic effects on heavier weapons are deliberately hamstrung. I strongly disagree with this design decision. If the player is going to spend the effort or scroll to identify the weapon that has the slimmest chance of being runic, then the possible reward should be greatest. As it stands, even when a war pike is successfully discovered to be runic, it's going to be less powerful than a dagger with the same rune. I understand that runics are meant to increase interesting in identifying weaker weapons, but now the balance has swung too far in that direction. Runic war pikes aren't worth carrying, much less identifying.

I really feel that the number of items you find repsectively the number of vaults should be reduced. In some games you just feel like being in the junkyard of doom. Item management can get so tedious with too many items.

I had a half-baked idea:1. Potion of Swimming - This temporarily grants the player the ability to submerge under the water like a naga to avoid missiles and detection (...does the player already do this?) and while in effect prevents the player's items from getting swept away (although I suppose that effect wouldn't be clear from the name). This would also let the player fight submerged monsters on their own terms, without worrying about items floating away.

Sylverone wrote:I had a half-baked idea:1. Potion of Swimming - This temporarily grants the player the ability to submerge under the water like a naga to avoid missiles and detection (...does the player already do this?) and while in effect prevents the player's items from getting swept away (although I suppose that effect wouldn't be clear from the name). This would also let the player fight submerged monsters on their own terms, without worrying about items floating away.

Right now, "wandering" land-based monsters can't detect the player while he's surrounded by deep water, but "hunting" monsters can target and damage a swimming player with spells.

I like this idea, provided that being submerged would also protect the player from all effects of gasses and explosions, even while in shallow water (or bogs). Also, if paired with a potion of fire immunity, this should let you swim in lava and detect submerged salamanders. One last nice bonus would be if a submerged player could target submerged enemies with spells.

So, as far as I understand, the scent map is essentially an array that tracks the turn numbers of when the player last spread his "scent" onto each tile. If this is true, then it should (I hope) be relatively easy to keep track of what turn each monster spawned, and then set it so monsters can't be alerted to the player's presence by scent from before that turn. Can you please do this? If a pixie spawns out of my LOS it shouldn't start hunting and discord one of my allies on its very first turn of action.

Another suggestion: Right now, discordant allies follow the player down through chasms and pit traps, even if they don't have "flying" and have to suffer damage. If they acted more like hunting monsters and stayed on the upper floor this would give the player a consistent but still appropriately risky way of separating discordant allies from the rest of the group.

Scrolls of aggravate monsters would have a practical use if they made fleeing monkeys and "keeps its distance" spellcasters come and attack the player at melee range. Aggravate monsters already overrides magical fleeing, so it makes some sense.

Scrolls of summon monsters would have a practical use if there was a one-turn delay before the monsters could attack, like when polymorphing or beckoning a monster, which would let you isolate summoned bloats for use in traps, or that kind of thing.

The single-turn death of getting shot by a flame turret in a bog just isn't a good roguelike death. You can't appreciate your heroic attempts to stay alive since you don't get a chance to make any. You can't moan and say "oh man, I shoulda done such and such" because usually the only thing you shoulda done is sat still somewhere until your health was all the way full, which is usually a bad strategy if you don't like spawning monsters and starving.

My suggestion is that you change turrets so that they can't fire on you the first turn you come in range. If I can't use that one turn to protect myself then my death will be my own fault.

Creaphis wrote:My suggestion is that you change turrets so that they can't fire on you the first turn you come in range. If I can't use that one turn to protect myself then my death will be my own fault.

I second this motion. Also, it makes me very sad when my unprotected armor gets weakened and there was zero that I could have done about it.

Creaphis wrote:My suggestion is that you change turrets so that they can't fire on you the first turn you come in range. If I can't use that one turn to protect myself then my death will be my own fault.

I second this motion. Also, it makes me very sad when my unprotected armor gets weakened and there was zero that I could have done about it.

I always walk around unexplored terrain without armor for that reason.